Elon Musk-supported Dogecoin’s price hits new all-time high after scorching past 50 cents mark

Dogecoin’s market cap on Wednesday stood at $83.24 billion, as per Coindesk. (Image: Bloomberg)

After Bitcoin and Ethereum, it’s Dogecoin — the cryptocurrency named after a meme of the Japanese dog breed Shiba Inu and started as a satirical alternative to Bitcoin’s craze – that’s hogging the limelight. The coin, which is already the fourth-largest cryptocurrency as per CoinMarketCap, surged to a new all-time high price of $0.69 (69 cents) a coin on Wednesday, according to the data from CoinDesk. Dogecoin, which has Tesla’s Elon Musk among its ardent supporters, had earlier peaked to $0.41 on April 20 before sliding to $0.23 on April 24. Since then, the ‘joke’ coin has largely been on an upward trajectory and was trading at $0.65 at the time of filing this report. The coin’s market cap on Wednesday stood at $83.24 billion while its price had shot up 128 per cent from $0.30 over the past seven days.

Dogecoin Price

Source: Coindesk

According to experts, one of the reasons for the rise is the fast and free transactions investors experience with Dogecoin vis-à-vis Bitcoin. “Bitcoin’s unprecedented success and its number of transactions have made the transaction fee shoot up as every transaction is fighting to get to its confirmation sooner than later. A transaction on bitcoin’s main blockchain can cost as much as Rs 1,500 and takes about 20 minutes to get confirmed. On the other side, Dogecoin is exactly filling this gap allowing fast and free transactions even for the smallest of transfers along with confirmation times as little as one minute,” Sathvik Vishwanath, Co-Founder & CEO, Unocoin told Financial Express Online.

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Moreover, the rise of multiple projects or coins beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum, as the industry continues to grow, has created awareness among investors looking for alternatives. Over the period more and more first-time investors, which are gaining interest in crypto, want to cut a slice of it to themselves. However, popular coins like Bitcoin and Ethereum have been rallying at an overwhelming price.

“In a situation like this, a new investor is easily drawn towards the new projects that have somewhat just got into the news but are still more affordable. The same happened when Elon Musk tweeted and in the next couple of days you can see a significant rise in the price. In the current price rise, one more thing contributed as an active factor, which is an announcement by two major exchanges that said, they will be listing Dogecoin for their users,” Kumar Gaurav- Founder and CEO, Cashaa told Financial Express Online. Israel-based social trading platform eToro and New York-based cryptocurrency exchange Gemini recently announced Dogecoin listing.

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